I Unsubscribed From Your Newsletter

Okay maybe I didn’t unsubscribe from your newsletter specifically, but I unsubscribed from a lot over the past few weeks.

Here are some of the reasons why:

I’m not your target audience.

This is the one reason that hurt. I felt guilty.

I was subscribed to a lot of my friends’ newsletters—people I love, admire, and look up to. I think they’re doing great things and I’m proud of them.

BUT

When it comes to business, I knew I wasn’t their target audience. A few examples of these peoples’ audiences might be:

• People just looking to start a business.
• People looking to refine their processes.
• People new to blogging.
• People new to coding.

None of those things are me.

While I may love these people as friends, and while I might think their content is great, it’s not the content for me. I’m past those points. I got tired of having so much content in my inbox that wasn’t useful to me.

When unsubscribing from these lists, I was paranoid that the people would think I hated them, no longer wanted to be their friend, or thought their content sucked. I’m still a little paranoid about it.

But hey, we all need to accept that not everything we put out there is going to be applicable to everyone, and that’s okay. We can still be friends with someone, but not be their target audience and decide not to get their newsletter because of it.

I don’t like your approach.

Eeks. That’s harsh. What am I talking about? This: I’m tired of being sold to.

Yes, I get that business owners need to make money. Myself included. Selling is inevitable when signing up to a business owner’s mailing list.

But I decided to unsubscribe from everyone that I thought was in “sell mode” all the time. And again, I’m not saying those people are “doing it wrong”, because they’re not. I’m just saying they’re doing it wrong for me.

I don’t want every single thing in my inbox to have an agenda or a price tag or a motive.

• I want some personal content.
• I want some things to be “just because”—not “because it’ll make me money”.

I need to keep my inbox as much of a happy and inspiring place as possible. If everything is just SELL SELL SELL, then that drags me down and stresses me out. It’s not an environment I can deal with.

It’s not what I signed up for.

A few times I’ve signed up for someone’s newsletter because I fell in love with their blog posts. Really what I wanted was to receive their blog posts via email, but they didn’t have an option for that—just a separate “newsletter”. So I sign up for that instead.

But then, this “newsletter” ends up being nothing like the blog posts. It’s completely different and not the same thing I fell in love with originally.

So while I did make the decision to sign up, I didn’t get the content I was expecting and it’s not something I want in my inbox.